No matter how great a product is, a poor website user experience can be devastating to any business. Recent research from Forrester found that providing a good user experience through your business website could increase conversions by up to 400 percent — which is a hard number to ignore.
When customers need to solve a problem, they often go online. The critical first step toward capturing their attention is making sure they can find your business website, but it's just as important that your user experience convinces them to stay and convert.
Here are several simple guidelines to help you build an experience that attracts cutomers and grows your incoming revenue.
Clean, Easy Navigation
Businesses can sabotage their own websites when they try to do too much. Overloading web pages with content — including too many media-rich assets that slow down page load times — and creating a counterintuitive navigation experience are both easy ways to irritate your viewers and convince them to click away.
A busy website isn't necessarily a productive one. Oftentimes, less is more. Keep it clean and organized, with clear navigation buttons and carefully chosen content that informs the customer in a concise manner.
Top-Heavy Page Organization
When consumers are in the research stage of making a purchase, they aren't likely to read long passages about the benefits of one company's solutions. Website design should acknowledge that customers might be new to a site and, therefore, unlikely to scroll far down the page. The most pertinent information should be included at the top of the page, with secondary information placed below it. Include calls to action, lead forms and other key assets high on the page where they're immediately visible.
Striking Landing Pages
Instead of directing visitors to the company's homepage, most businesses that use ads to encourage referrals prefer to send customers to a landing page built around the same selling points used by the original ad to drive a click. It's difficult to overstate the value of a good landing page — one that's designed to engage customers and support them through the buyer journey can quickly and consistently drive conversions and other revenue opportunities.
Every business should try to closely monitor landing page performance and determine where improvements to the design can be made. Some well-known landing page best practices include using a dynamic main image that's immediately recognizable and memorable, offering streamlined content to emphasize the benefits of your company and the ease of getting started as well as providing a lead form or other conversion tool that collects information and advances the customer to the next step.
A Strong, Clear CTA
Marketing Land has insisted that any call to action must be clear and direct in its ask. Furthermore, marketers shouldn't be afraid to utilize multiple CTAs on a single page. If you choose to include a lot of content on the page, consider placing CTAs at the top and bottom of the page, so viewers can move quickly to the next step if they're ready.
With these basic elements in place, your website user experience will better serve your incoming traffic and your efforts to improve conversion rates.
